Destiny (83 page)

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with Louise, anything was possible. But on the whole, Ghislaine thought not. What Louise wanted, she suspected—what she had always wanted— was not sex at all, but adoration.

She thought back then to the past, and to Xavier de Chavigny, whom she had met only once or twice, when she was still a young girl. That marvelous man—she had always admired him from afar; when she had still been full of romantic dreams, before she grew up and discovered what most men were like; when she had been young, ah, how she had dreamed of meeting a man like the Baron de Chavigny. And Louise, who had been his wife, whom he had loved madly, everyone said so—she was now reduced to this: to being proud to hint that she had a nothing like Phihppe de Belfort as her admirer.

It was then, quite suddenly, when Louise was toying with her food, and describing her house, which was charming, and yet not quite what she wanted, that the fear struck Ghislaine. She looked at Louise, and to her horror saw herself in twenty years' time. Not as stupid as Louise, perhaps; not as self-deluding; but just as disappointed.

She had her work, of course, which made a difference; Louise had never lifted a finger in her hfe. But still, however hard she tried to avoid it, Ghislaine could see a certain horrible resemblance. Louise had been married only once—Ghislaine three times, all unhappily. For the last ten years she'd been trapped with that peasant Jean-Jacques, loathing him, trying not to mind when her friends smirked because they knew—all Paris knew —about the latest model, the latest typist, the latest calendar girl. Jean-Jacques, who liked best to fuck her when he knew she had just come from her lover's. And the lovers themselves: that procession of unmemorable young men, who invariably failed to give her the most minimal satisfaction . . . was there one of them who loved her, one of them who would ask her to leave Jean-Jacques, and marry him? No, there was not. They liked the fact that she was married: it made them feel safer.

"The salon faces out over the sea," Louise was saying with a small discontented pout. "I liked that to begin with, but the light, you know—it reflects, it makes the room so very bright. ..." Ghislaine hardly heard a word she said. She thought: I'm forty-seven; Louise is sixty-seven. She thought: I could give them up, Jean-Jacques, all the goddamned men. I could concentrate on my work. I could make it on my own. Who needs them—who needs any of them?

Just for a moment she felt courage, she felt confidence: she could see herself doing it. Then the courage deflated hke a pricked balloon. She knew it wasn't true; she knew she didn't want it; a woman without a man was nothing, a figure of ridicule—like Louise.

No, she needed a man—and at the same second she acknowledged that

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fact, she knew with a sudden sharp instinct which man. She saw him quite distinctly—the man who so resembled his father, the man who was the embodiment of all her earliest ideals. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have been so lazy? How could she have known, always, that she was attracted to him, and yet have made no move, have done nothing at all? She set down her fork with a sudden little clatter. She blushed, in a way she had not done since she was a girl, slowly and agonizingly, the heat rushing up over her neck and suffusing her face.

Louise looked at her with a malice which she was at pains to conceal.

Poor Ghislaine, she thought with acid amusement. So she has reached the menopause—she always lied about her age, one could never be certain. . . . She would be kind, Louise resolved, and ignore Ghislaine's obvious humiliation.

"So tell me, darling Ghislaine. Will you still do it for me? Can it be done in time?"

Even then, when she could not think for the rush of excitement she felt, Ghislaine managed to keep some of her wits about her. She pretended an impossible schedule of work, she pleaded prior commissions, until Louise —who always wanted something more if she felt she might not get it—was forced to become pressing. Then, and only then, did Ghislaine capitulate.

"For you, my dear," she said with a smile. "Very well."

Louise was an impossible client. She changed her mind a million times a minute, she haggled over prices like an Arab street vendor; Ghislaine did not care. She had the perfect entree, the perfect opportunity. She could easily manage to remain at the villa until Edouard arrived—she checked the dates and made sure of it. Meanwhile, she threw herself into her work with new energy; it would be beautiful, spectacular, the best thing she had ever done. She was doing it, she felt, for Edouard, not for his fool of a mother—and when he saw it, and admired it, ah, then, what then? She was not sure, except that it might be the beginning.

She worked confidently, surely, for a week. In that time, she lost weight, bought new clothes, had her hair cut, changed the scent she wore. She began to feel like a new woman.

She had little impulses, and she gave in to them: once she rang Edouard's number at St. Cloud, in the hope of hearing his voice, but his manservant answered. Another time, she drove past his offices. She took to lunching at a restaurant he frequented, and one day glimpsed him in the distance. She found she took great delight in speaking of him to her friends: just to say his name gave her pleasure—and of course, there was

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an additional benefit: her friends all confirmed what she herself had suspected—Edouard was unattached. Edouard—always so sought after, and always so alone.

In seven days she felt she had lived through a year; there had been so many advances in her mind in that time that it was difficult to believe that nothing had actually happened. Ghislaine felt that it had, and that just as she had been transformed, so Edouard could be—once he began to perceive her differently. They were old friends—that was something to build on. He respected her work; he admired her taste; now that she looked back on it, she felt that, yes, there had perhaps always been something special in his manner toward her, an indefinable something. . . . Ah, Edouard!

And then, just when she felt twenty years younger, on the crest of a wonderful wave, it happened. She was walking home from work one beautiful evening, and stopped dead suddenly, in the middle of the sidewalk. Across the street there was a movie theater, and outside the theater was a series of posters. They were photographs of a girl, a very beautiful girl, in a white dress.

Level brows, short dark hair, a wide mouth, a defiant modem stance. The color of the hair, and the shortness of it, confused Ghislaine, just for an instant.

Then she recognized her. The girl from the Loire; the girl in the Givenchy; the girl wearing Edouard's diamond ring. The girl she had first seen coming out of a little disreputable hotel, on Edouard's arm, at nine o'clock in the morning.

Ghislaine stood very still. Then she began to walk again, continuing her walk home, more slowly. Quite suddenly, the evening, the past week, everything, was spoiled.

Halfway down the Boulevard St. Germain, there was a line of the posters, a solid phalanx of them, each eight feet high. From these posters, Edouard averted his eyes. Short Cut, a Thaddeus Angelini film, he read, in huge black letters over the entrance of the theater nearby. There was a line of people outside, waiting for the early evening performance; it stretched past the theater and well down the street. Edouard leaned forward, opened the partition, and asked his driver to hurry. He leaned back again on the leather seats and closed his eyes.

He had just been in New York: the city had been plastered with her image. Now it was all over Paris, everywhere he looked. And it would get worse. Once she arrived in Cannes for the film festival, there would be

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blanket coverage: every newspaper, every magazine; she would be on television, on billboards. . . .

That odd moment had been reached when a name became, almost overnight, and by some curious alchemy, a household word. When it happened, it was always with astonishing rapidity. One moment someone was known only to the few, was being tipped, perhaps, for success and fame, but no more; the next, that person's name was on everyone's hps, familiar to everyone from presidents to fishmongers, public property, part of the common currency of thought.

Edouard had no doubt that Helene would win the award at Cannes. He thought it would not be very long before she received an Academy Award. He had seen Short Cut, of course, long before Christian, long before its release; its almost insolent assurance had filled him with an angry admiration. Annoyingly, Angehni actually possessed some of the genius he had claimed. Helene, just as Angelini had predicted, possessed, on film, an extraordinary and innocent eroticism. Images from that film, mixed with images from his past, haunted him.

Now there was this new project, Ellis, for which Angelini was seeking major backing from Sphere. He planned to make the movie the following year, and a copy of Angelini's screenplay now lay on the desk in Edouard's study at St. Cloud. That evening, Edouard must decide whether to authorize the funding for the film, or not. He had already read the screenplay; tonight, he would read it again.

The black Rolls pulled up outside the de Chavigny showrooms in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore. The uniformed doorman advanced, bowing. Edouard entered by his private entrance, and went, as arranged, straight to the vaults.

There, on a special table in a room set apart from the strongrooms, the pieces he had requested be ready for him to inspect had been laid out. A dozen leather jewelcases, exquisitely tooled, their design and decoration redolent of their different periods. Some de Chavigny, some Cartier, one from Wartski's in London, another from Bulgari, one from Van Cleef and Arpels.

Edouard asked to be alone, and then began opening the cases one by one. He was choosing his daughter's birthday present, which, when chosen, would be put back in the special safe in the de Chavigny vaults, until . . . until she was older, Edouard told himself.

Two presents already lay in that safe. One, a necklace of pearls, and superb rose and briolette-cut diamonds, had been the prize of Wyspianski's first collection; it had been placed there to mark Catharine's birth. The second, marking her first birthday, was a tiara designed for the firm of Cartier in 1914: an exquisite circlet of black onyx and circular cut dia-

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monds, surmounted by a ring of pearls. It was—unlike many tiaras—light. He thought Catharine would find it pleasurable to wear it.

Now he moved slowly along the line of boxes, opening them one by one. From Cartier again: a diamond aigrette, commissioned from them by Prince Gortchakov in 1912, a delicate spray plume above a pear-shaped diamond weighing some twenty carats. From de Chavigny: a necklace of sapphire and emerald beads with diamond rondelles, designed by Vlacek for his father in the 1920s. Not emeralds, Edouard thought, and turned to the next box.

A serious ring, a very serious ring: a square-cut canary diamond of nearly thirty carats, which Edouard did not greatly like, though the value of the stone was great. A little gold vanity case, enameled and inlaid with lapis lazuli the color of his daughter's eyes. A unique watch, a collector's piece, with works by the celebrated Jean Vergely, mounted on a silk cord, designed in 1925 in the art deco manner, gold and lapis again, with two tiny ruby studs to mark the extremity of the hours. A carved coral necklace, made in China in the eighteenth century, its carved flowers spilling little clusters of onyx, diamonds, and black pearls. A ruby and diamond stomacher brooch, designed for one of the Romanovs; a diamond resille necklace, made by de Chavigny in 1903, copied from a necklace once worn by Marie Antoinette, and bought by the courtesan, la Belle Otero. . . .

Edouard looked at each piece once. Some of them had a sad history, and these he pushed aside. He hesitated; there was a pair of matching bracelets surmounted with cabochon rubies that had once belonged to the Maharaja of Mysore—Isobel would have adored those, he thought sadly—they, indeed, were superbly pagan. In the end he chose the piece whose value lay in its workmanship, not its stones: the Chinese necklace. It was put in the safe; Edouard left for St. Cloud.

He stared out the windows of the car with blank eyes, seeing nothing of his surroundings. Two and a half years. Sometimes, in his blackest moments, he felt that the certitude and hope he still occasionally experienced were nothing more than a fabrication, a perverse and destructive obsession to which he clung in the midst of the bleakness and pointlessness of his life. At other times, he felt the opposite. He had ceased now to argue with himself. The two opposing possibilities coexisted all the time, like twin poles—the north and south of his mind. The constant oscillation of his spirit between them, he now accepted. If he had had to describe his state of mind he would have said, wryly, that he was resigned.

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At St. Cloud he ate a solitary meal, formally served. He then returned to his study, which was unchanged. The same Turner watercolors still hung on the walls; the same rugs lay on the floor, and he thought momentarily of Isobel, sitting there, twisting her face up to him, with that self-mocking emerald glance, telling him about her marriage, about living with a man who wanted to die.

Edouard sat down at his desk. In one of the drawers, which he unlocked, was a plain envelope with an American air mail stamp. It had arrived the previous day, which had been his daughter's birthday.

He opened it once more, and drew out the photograph, and the small sheet of paper attached to it, on which were written a few sentences in Madeleine's handwriting.

The photograph showed a little girl wearing a hand-smocked blue dress; she had bare legs and wore sandals. Her black hair was simply cut, in a straight bob to the shoulders. She was looking directly at the camera, with her dark blue eyes; she was not smiling.

She was standing in a garden, and behind her—just visible—were the walls and windows of a house. Slightly to one side of the child, looking at her proudly, were two women: one was Madeleine, wearing the pale brown Norland College uniform; the other was an older woman, plump, with gray hair.